Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Video Marketing How-To. Today we want to share a few tips for optimizing your video content so your audience has a great experience on mobile devices.
Tip number one is to make sure your players are responsive so people viewing on mobile screens that aren’t the standard desktop size won’t see a huge version of your video that doesn’t fit on their screen.
Which is a great segue to tip number two. Most mobile screens are quite a bit smaller than your standard desktop, so your splash screen doesn’t have the same amount of space to prove that your video is compelling. If you’re creating video for a mobile audience, exaggerate the compelling aspects of your video in the splash screen, and give people a big indication of what your video is about so they know to watch it.
Tip number three is mostly for social video, but it applies everywhere — if you’re adding captions to your video content, don’t assume that people will be reading them on a 40-inch television in their living room. Captions that are too small are useless to mobile viewers that may not be able to turn the sound up on your video, so create captions that are viewable on any device.
That wraps up today’s episode of Video Marketing How-To! Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for another episode in another few weeks!
Engaging content is more essential than ever in today’s busy media landscape, and one smart way to heighten the engagement factor of yours is with multimedia. Adding multimedia is both an art and a science. If done right, it can help your content gain a competitive edge. If your photos are boring, your videos aren’t helpful, and your infographics aren’t outstanding, you’ll miss out on valuable traffic that can lead to sales. The good news is, there are some standards and best practices you can rely on to make sure your multimedia content checks out.
Multimedia refers to the electronically delivered combination of media – or methods of communication, including text, graphics, video, animation, and sound that can be accessed in an interactive way. Much of the content online today falls within this scope.
How has the use of multimedia in content changed over the last 5 years?
In the past 5 years, internet use worldwide has drastically increased. The digital revolution has had a major impact on the way we communicate – advances in technology have influenced the development of multimedia systems such that virtually all computers in use today have some capacity to create and display multimedia.
Here are some stats that point to the increasing importance of multimedia:
Publishers that use infographics grow their website traffic an average of 12% over those that don’t
80% of journalists reportedly felt that including photos, infographics, or video with a story is very important to the story
What are Google Panda and Google Hummingbird, and how do they affect multimedia?
Of course, if your content isn’t being found online, multimedia won’t work for you. You want to make sure your content is recognized by Google and served up for the right queries.
Google Panda (which rolled out in July 2015), and aimed to downrank pages that it deemed low quality. According to a Google spokesperson, “When our algorithms look out for unique, compelling, and high-quality content, that can have many forms, including images, videos, or other kinds of embedded rich-media … it helps us a lot to have context of any content like that, and we generally pick up that context in the form of text on pages that embed that kind of content.” So, provide text around your images and video (captions and surrounding text) as well as alt text to give Google cues.
Google’s Hummingbird update took place in 2013, and aimed to facilitate ranking of pages based on semantic search. Content must be created to match the more-conversational queries of searchers. Not only does that include conversational writing but according to Hubspot, “the more you can diversify your brand with different digital media assets, the more likely you are to curry favor with the search engines and the searchers” – Google now delivers a blend of multimedia results including images, product listings, reviews, and photos.
Importance of Content Quality and Optimization
Google’s algorithm can change on a dime, but with every update Google has made, it has prized higher-quality content. Content creators who are genuinely interested in providing valuable, engaging and clear information – in the forms readers want – will not be at a loss. Help Google understand the context of your multimedia content by adhering to these optimization best practices:
When adding images: Include an image file name (ideally this will include a focus keyword you want to rank for), image size (for faster loading time) alt text, description and caption
When uploading a video: Titles and tags are a major factor in making your videos more discoverable. Include brand keywords in your tagging, and try your best to avoid irrelevant tags
When uploading audio files: Optimize audio file names with relevant keywords just as you would for image files. Make sure each podcast episode has its own unique title and description
Optimizing press releases with multimedia and links
Today’s high-performance press releases, like content, include multimedia assets as well as well-placed links, compelling headlines and engaging CTAs. They’re created with shareability and search engine-friendly language in mind. In content as in news releases, Google will penalize an overuse of keywords or links, so write press releases and content with links that lead naturally to other content as you see fit, and incorporate keywords in a way that is natural.
This is a guest contribution from Tom Hunt of VirtualValley.io
I remember the exact moment.
It’s 11am. I am sitting in a coworking space in Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, just starting to feel the rush of my second black filter coffee of the day.
Do you ever feel like you’re all alone in the blogosphere? In this episode, Tonya Rapley shares her best tips on how to build a community of bloggers.
One that will support you on your journey and help you to build a successful blogging business.
Who is Tonya Rapley
Tonya Rapley is the founder of My Fab Finance, a blog dedicated to inspiring others to take control of their financial future.
After improving her credit score by 130 points in 18 months and significantly growing her investment portfolio and savings, she became a certified financial educator.
When she realized that she had a knack for personal finance and helping others with their financial struggles, she started My Fab Finance.
Tonya has been featured on a number of media outlets like ABC, Black Enterprise, US News and World Report and others.
Tonya’s Journey
Tonya started her blogging journey with a blog she created called Eargasm. It was a blog that featured unknown or lesser-known musicians.
However, she never had a sound business plan for that blog and it never developed into what she wanted it to be.
A few years back, her financial situation was in shambles and she wanted a change.
While working with the elderly, she noticed that some residents had planned for retirement and others didn’t. That’s when it hit her – she will be old someday and needed to have a better plan than she had at the time.
This started a journey to make her financial situation better. In doing this, she realized that she didn’t have to make a lot of money to be financially secure.
Instead, she needed to do a better job at managing her money.
My Fab Finance was started as an “accountability partner” in January 2013.
She went on a “dining out fast” and started saving a lot of money, even while making only $28k.
The result – she is now financially secure and helps others to accomplish the same.
When she started her blog, she was working as a coordinator of community initiatives in Brooklyn, NY AND also in graduate school.
How did she get it all done? She found the time.
She worked late at night, wrote whenever she had a chance – on train rides and even while at work.
She knew she had to hustle to get it done. No excuses!
Building a Community of Bloggers
Community of Bloggers
Having a community of bloggers has been an essential part of Tonya’s success.
She’s a part of a group of women bloggers called the Frugal Fab Five. These are like-minded individuals who come together to support each other around their goals.
Because of this group . . .
She was named “the new face of wealth-building” on the cover of Black Enterprise. This was based on a recommendation from one of the women in the group.
They are constantly learning from each other.
Whenever she has something to launch, she gets feedback from the other members of the group.
This is similar to what I’ve spoken about in the past related to mastermind groups.
Here are some of Tonya’s tips for building your own community of bloggers.
Find like-minded people who are at your level
By getting people who are at your level, everyone can gain from each other’s knowledge and experience.
How did Tonya do this? She found her group on social media.
Take relationships to the next level
On Twitter and Instagram, you are able to see other users who are similar to you in your industry.
She found these women and started reaching out to them.
This reaching out can be done in various ways, from simply sharing their content all the way to being straightforward and going in for the ask.
Tonya compares this process to dating. It’s often best to start small and then take the relationship to the next level over time.
How you approach this will vary based on the personalities involved.
Collaborate to take the relationship to the next level
Tonya’s group started collaborating by creating events together. They did a few of these events and then started hosting Twitter chats.
She encourages you to find a way to have to interact at a deeper level the individuals you want to be in a “relationship” with.
Have regular meetings, but be willing to adapt
They started off by having monthly calls. This allowed them to connect on a regular basis and help each other grow their businesses.
Now that they are further along in their journey, they don’t meet as regularly. However, they still take time to support each other.
Whenever someone needs assistance or feedback, they all come on board to help.
Final Tips
Learn from others
When I asked Tonya for tips she had to share about building a community of bloggers, here’s what she said:
Look at others as alliances and not competition. What is for you is for you. Nobody can squander the opportunities that are for you. Having this viewpoint frees you up to celebrate the success of others.
Be the person you want others to be. Nobody wants to be in a relationship with someone they don’t like.
Allow yourself to learn from others. As a blogger, it’s easy to be isolated from others. However, you can’t attend all the educational opportunities that are available. But if you’re able to benefit from the knowledge of others, you’ll be one step ahead.
Take The Challenge
If you’re interested in crushing your debt, check out Tonya’s 8-week initiative that she’s calling the “#Banish the Balance Challenge.”
It’s a FREE debt repayment challenge designed to teach you how to pay down debt, end the habitual cycle of debt, and finally become debt-free.
You know that wooden chair you snagged off the side of the road? Or the old nightstand you got off of Kijiji for $10? They still work great! But someone decided they weren’t up-to-date with current trends. Good thing you have an eye for DIY projects and a way with that white milk paint.
With all the content you produce, it’s inevitable that some of your content may end up out-of-date as well. But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw it out and start from scratch. Sometimes all it needs is a quick refresh.
Refreshing your video content can help you save oodles of time and money. It can also be a simple way to re-align content with new messaging or a way to re-engage your audience. Let’s explore what types of videos you should and shouldn’t refresh, what update opportunities exist, and how to know your content needs a facelift.
What type of video content should you refresh?
Not every single type of video in every context lends itself well to an upcycle. But here’s a list of some of the best opportunities you might have on your own site:
Blog videos:Has a method or concept changed since you last published on that topic? You don’t necessarily have to update the entire video, but you could add updates throughout the clip with text annotations or a even a quick filmed update at the beginning or end.
Culture videos:Has your team changed? If you’re interviewing a specific person in a culture video that no longer works at the company, consider replacing just their snippet with a new interviewee.
Webinars:If your webinars are posted chronologically, like most, no one’s watching your 60-minute webinar from 2013. Try updating it (or even re-purposing it) by cutting it into smaller pieces and adding it to a new blog post.
Product videos: Do you use screenshots or clips of your product in your demo videos? If so, these will have to be checked frequently and updated accordingly because products are always changing!
Research:New research comes out all the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to scrap last quarter’s video just because some updated research has come to light. You can always update one stat or add a stat in. This even works if the video was a motion graphic.
Testimonials:Sometimes your biggest advocate leaves the company they were working for and their testimonial is no longer as impactful, since … well, they don’t work for that company any more. As long as your customer team has been doing a great job of re-building relationships at that company, consider updating the speaker in your testimonial video. You can even do this while keeping most of the messaging the same.
What type of video content should you avoid refreshing?
Other types of videos don’t lend themselves well to a refresh but are better either (a) left untouched or (b) completely redone.
Evergreen How-to Content:If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Even if you are a DIY wiz. Evergreen content is called that for a reason; if it’s still teaching a valuable lesson, leave it the way it is.
Home Page Video:This is the video that sits front and centre. Unless you’ve just recently found a mistake or you updated your tagline just a month after you published the video, you should simply create a new one. Change on a home page can be a great way to re-engage visitors!
Rebranded Video Content: If you’re going through an entire rebrand, an update to video content probably just isn’t going to cut it. Chances are you’ll need to start from scratch, and it will probably be a more efficient use of everyone’s time to do it this way than try to re-jig old content to fit a new mold.
There’s an endless list of things you can update within each video. Here’s a brief list to get you started when you’re freshening things up:
Statistics or research
Screencasts or product shots
Value prop or messaging
Logos
Employees (your own)
Employees (your customers)
CTAs or form fields
Filming
On that last one, consider that you may re-film an entire video but utilize the same concept from the previous video. Sure, you’re spending time re-filming, but you’re saving a lot of pre-production time if you re-purpose the initial concept. This counts as an upcycle, too!
How do you know when your content needs a refresh?
You know when you’re wearing bell-bottoms and everyone else is in skinny jeans? Or you’re still mastering cross-stitch and everyone else has moved on to chalk paint? Then you know it’s time for an update.
For marketing collateral, it’s a little trickier, I’ll admit. But with the right practices in place, hopefully you’ll realize your content is heading in the direction of outdated before it’s way out of line.
Keeping Product Site Videos Updated
If you have any big changes in the company like a large number of new hires or layoffs, product launches, product updates, or a refined brand, you’ll likely need some refreshed content.
For less obvious changes, consider doing a quarterly site audit. Keep a spreadsheet up-to-date will all the pages on your website and the videos on each page, when they were made, and when they were last updated. Make note of those that need a refresh and ensure your in-house video team or your agency is planning and has the bandwidth for regular video update projects. It’s a common occurrence, so there should be time allotted for it.
Keeping Content Marketing Videos Updated
Keeping content marketing and blog videos up-to-date is a whole other beast. I don’t know about you, but we have hundreds and hundreds of blog posts. Some companies have thousands.
So how do you keep track of all your video blog posts?
A quick hack is to use a tag or filter for all video blogs, specifically. At Vidyard, we use series naming conventions like “Video Marketing How-To” … partly for this purpose, and partly for audience understanding! This way, you’re at least looking at a fewer number of posts. However, since you’re a marketer who probably has to keep your written content up-to-snuff as well, try following this, more comprehensive, approach:
When you write a post, rank it on a scale of ‘evergreen-ness’ from 1-3. 3 means it will basically never become out-of-date and 1 means it’s very topical. 1’s could be product information, new technology in the industry, or recent research. 1’s will need more frequent updating.
Go through the 1’s once a quarter to see if the topic requires an update. For example, if the best way to fit boots for dogs has recently changed, then Mutt-Luks should update their blog post from last quarter on fitting your dog for winter boots.
Go through the 2’s twice per year and the 3’s once per year just to double check.
It can be a lot of tedious work, but it pays off. Even just adding a quick two- to three-line update on a blog post can bring it back as up-to-date, relevant content thatGoogle will reward. And Google is King, after all.
Or, you can completely update and revamp a post.
Either way, it’s great to include a blurb somewhere within the post if you’ve completed an update. The editor’s note below is what Hubspot typically uses, as an example.
Now here’s a question, you DIY genius. Are there opportunities on your site to update video content without having to completely re-do it? Where will you start?
If you have a business website, be it an online store, a web app or a magazine, you know that promoting it and doing some advertising is a must if you want your site to grow and become popular.
Most people know the traditional advertising methods: display banners, video ads, Facebook ads and so on. One advertising method you probably don’t know about, but that is very efficient, is blog reviews.
By getting a blog review you’ll be able to get your brand in front of the audience of the specific blogs and sites you choose. If those are relevant to your product or service, the overall return on investment should be nice, because you’ll be exposing your brand to people who interested in it.
The big advantage of blog reviews over other forms of advertising is that your message will go straight to the visitors. People tend to ignore banners and traditional ads, but they will read a blog review just like they would a normal post, making it a very effective advertising option.
When people hear about blog reviews they tend to think that we are talking about fake reviews. That is not the case. Most review networks required the bloggers to write real and unbiased reviews about the products and services. You can also disclaim that the review is sponsored by your company, making the process 100% transparent and ethical.
If you want a recommendation, check out the guys from Get Reviewed. It’s a new blog review advertising network that is growing quite fast, and they already have a nice list of authority blogs where you can get reviews from.
Finally, remember to not put all your eggs on the same basket. Mixing banner ads, social media advertising and blog reviews can be an efficient combination to raise awareness about your brand and drive more visitors and customers to your website!
Johnson will help Vidyard scale its video marketing platform as he did for Hootsuite’s social media platform.
KITCHENER, Ontario – March 24, 2016 – Vidyard, the video intelligence platform for business, today announced the addition of Steve Johnson to serve as company president and chief operations officer.
Johnson most recently held the role of chief revenue officer for Vancouver-based Hootsuite, where he helped the company capitalize on the huge rise of social media for business. During Johnson’s tenure at Hootsuite, the company grew from a sub-$100 million valuation to over $1 billion and from 27 employees to more than 800. He plans to help Vidyard make similar strides.
“I can hardly believe how much innovation is happening in marketing technology these days,” Johnson said. “Social media was the biggest marketing trend over the last five years, and now video is taking up that mantle. I’m excited to be on board to help Vidyard continue to dominate the video marketing world.”
Five years ago, only the most forward-looking companies had implemented social media programs. Many simply dedicated an intern to manage the various channels and push out content. That evolved into companies dedicating entire teams to social media, and every external-facing employee was expected to maintain a social media presence. Social media has become a critical piece of nearly every business.
Video is in a similar state today with the most innovative businesses capitalizing on it. According to a 2015 survey by Demand Metric, 74 percent of marketing leaders say video converts better than other forms of content, and Cisco predicts that 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be devoted to video by 2019. But even with the effectiveness of video emerging, just 14 percent of companies leverage the full capability of advanced video engagement analytics to prioritize and convert prospects into customers, Demand Metric found. Video and social media also complement each other well. Social posts with video attract three times more inbound links than those without, according to Marketing Sherpa.
Meanwhile, Vidyard has tripled its year-over-year revenue for the last two years while growing its customer base to include global leaders including Honeywell, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, Sharp and 24 of the top 100 global software companies.
Johnson will be responsible for continuing to scale Vidyard’s global sales and customer success programs while helping the company expand into new markets.
“Hiring an experienced professional like Steve is a signal of things to come,” said Vidyard CEO and co-founder Michael Litt. “We’re maturing our go-to-market model, and with his expertise, we will be able to provide exemplary service to our customers while continuing to grow exponentially for years to come. We’re the dominant player in this massive untouched category. Our plans are to continue leading the industry, aided by his experience and influence.”
In addition to his job at Vidyard, Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of Mobify, MarketLinc and Bench Accounting. Prior to his four-and-a-half years at Hootsuite, he was vice president for channel partners at Constant Contact, vice president for partners at Blackbaud and vice president of sales at Voice Automation, in addition to several other sales and director roles at other companies going back to 1991.
About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.
Just last month, American Express launched the following ad to promote their Blue Cash Everyday Card. Full of Tina Fey’s witty humor as she discovers ‘creepy gloves for her feet’ and makes up her own yoga poses, she inspires us all to get to the gym … or maybe just watch the video a few times. Take a look:
The entire clip is full of witty, parody humor, classic of Tina Fey. Her request at the end for the protein powder not to be bagged: “You don’t wrap that, I’ll eat it here.” just seals the deal!
What’s even better is that this is only the first video in a7-part series.
American Express decided to sign Tina Fey as an endorser back in 2014 to help customers relate to the American Express brand (which is ironic given that she’s spending more than any average woman would on fitness equipment in one go!)
“Tina Fey is universal in many ways with her humor, she is easy to relate to with her ‘every woman-ness’” said Andrew Katz, VP-Advertising at American Express.
Regardless of the motives for Tina Fey’s endorsement contract, let’s take a look at what B2B marketers can learn from this witty series.
Storytelling before Selling
When did you know exactly what this video was selling? Not until the very end of the video, right? The clip wasn’t all about Tina paying with her Amex card here, there, and everywhere. Instead, the video focused on a story — still related to using her Amex card — and reeled you in with humor right off the bat.
B2B marketers can do this, too. In fact, they should do this. People love stories. They’ll watch your stories more willingly than they’ll watch your product pitch. But one word of caution, you better make sure your video is ridiculously interesting if you’re not going to throw your brand or product/service in until the end … or else no one will still be there to see it. And no, this doesn’t mean that you can get away with a crummy video just by adding in your branding halfway through!
Make it a Double … or a Series!
While the workout gear video is certainly the star of this series, the other videos help to build out Tina’s character and also offer a next step in the journey for the viewer. Another video within the same series is a perfect way to move a YouTube viewer along your content journey; it’s not too much of an ask, but it doesn’t leave them hanging, either.
At the end of every single video in the series, American Express offers you two different options: subscribe to the channel, or watch more of Tina Fey’s outrageous spending habits and punchy humor.
If you’re letting your videos fade to black, you’re definitely missing out on a massive opportunity to help guide your viewers to another stage with you. This is true for any distribution location: YouTube, your website, social, etc.
Live and Breathe the Campaign
When you land on American Express’ YouTube home page, it’s all about the Tina Fey series.
As with any good marketing campaign, they’ve extended the reach beyond the videos themselves to hammer the message home. They even created a Tina Fey series-themed header image for their main page.
There was one opportunity left untouched, which was their website. There didn’t seem to be any mention of the series on American Express’ Blue Cash page. But hey, maybe that’s for good reason – to keep visitors purely focused on the card and features at hand.
Now here’s the real question: do you need a massive celebrity star to make this concept work? We don’t think so. Especially since it’s a series, you have time to develop a character that people really love. Sure, Tina Fey helped this first video get off the ground, but AT&T had a great series with some unknown characters named Frank and Charlie (no longer available on YouTube). But that series was wildly successful and anyone who watched a couple videos within the series became intimately familiar with these characters and their lines of humor.
If you ever wondered how to build a successful YouTube channel, this is the episode for you.
Patrick South shares his experiences building The Axel Show.
This YouTube channel had 61,526 Subscribers and 110,717,952 views when this episode was recorded.
If YouTube is a platform you are interested in, listen to this episode.
Who is Patrick South
I love this. When I asked Patrick for a bio, this is what he said:
“My family and I make awesome “Family-friendly” videos on YouTube together!
Our goal is to encourage families to grow stronger in their relationships with each other by example through recording our day to day lives and epic adventures!”
Simple, and I get it!
I met Patrick online through watching one of his videos that he made with his son.
He and his wife were on the podcast before and they shared valuable information about building a business as a family – a concept they called “Familypreneurship.”
Since that episode, Patrick has left his job to build his online business with his family, and it’s exciting to see their progress.
What Equipment Do They Use
Before we got into the details on how to build a successful YouTube channel, I wanted to know what kind of equipment Patrick uses for making videos.
I was fascinated by how simple his setup is. Here’s what he uses:
He also uses a GoPro Hero4 Session. He likes this one better. The sound quality is great and it has a rechargeable battery.
He doesn’t use external microphones or lighting
He purchased an inexpensive $7 handle that screws into the bottom of the camera
As you can see, a simple camera with a handle and that’s it. How do the videos turn out?
Here’s a great example from their most recent video:
How to Build a Successful YouTube Channel
The core of this episode is trying to understand what it takes to build a successful YouTube channel.
There’s so much information out there that will talk about algorithms, titles, descriptions, lighting and other technical details.
Patrick’s advice goes beyond these details and was very simple.
Make Sure You like What You’re Doing
I know, this sounds almost elementary. However, it was the thing that made The Axel show stand out to me.
Patrick and Axel (his son) went on fun adventures and shared them with the viewing audience.
I felt like I was on an adventure with them and because they were enjoying what they were doing, that came over on the video.
And I enjoyed watching it.
As Patrick put it, video is currently the most intimate way to connect with people online. So, visualize your audience looking into the camera and share your passion with them.
Think of Yourself as a Filmmaker
Think of yourself as a filmmaker
“But wait,” you say – “It’s only YouTube. Isn’t thinking like a filmmaker going a little too far?”
Not according to Patrick. However, the concept is simpler than you might imagine.
When you are creating a video, work on it until you like it. If you can’t make something that you would sit and watch, why would someone else watch it?
Don’t just cut stuff out.
Be creative and make your video interesting and engaging.
Get Over Yourself
When it comes to vlogging, I struggle with the idea of walking around with a camera and “looking stupid.”
I wanted to know if this was something that Patrick struggled with and was glad to know that he did (in the beginning).
His suggestion – Get over yourself.
Remember that what you are doing is not about you. It’s about your relationship with your audience.
It’s about the value you are sharing. It’s about the fact that you are helping people.
With significantly fewer subscribers, they have almost 13 times as many views as I do. What’s their secret?
Here’s what Patrick had to say…
Focus on a Specific Niche but Have a Bigger Message
Focus on a Specific Niche but Have a Bigger Message
When they started the Axel Show, it was “disguised” as a show about toy trucks. That was their specific niche.
However, the message was much bigger. It was about the fact that you could go outside, have an adventure and learn about the world around you.
Kids would see them having fun playing and could go out and do some of the same thing.
If, for example, you are doing a family vlog, how do your family relationships help another family in the real world? That’s what you share. That’s your bigger message.
Make Sure That Creating Your Videos Is Sustainable
Make Sure That Creating Your Videos Is Sustainable
When Patrick mentioned this, I thought he was gonna talk about making sure you are able to be consistent with your videos by keeping it simple.
Instead, he spoke about this in terms of your relationships. Make sure your video creation isn’t negatively affecting the relationships you have with your family members.
If it is, then it’s not sustainable.
Make Sure to Pay Attention to Your Text
YouTube doesn’t do a good job at indexing the content of your videos. You need to make sure to pay special attention to the text elements.
Make Sure to Pay Attention to Your Text
Titles, descriptions and tags give YouTube the information they need to decide how to rank your content.
Eventually, as your channel grows in authority, these factors will be less important. At that point, it’s more about your thumbnail images and the quality of your content.
Patrick shares a great strategy for coming up with effective titles:
Open a browser window in incognito mode.
Go to YouTube and start searching for a specific topic.
YouTube will autosuggest a few searches based on what people are already looking for.
Get title ideas from those results
Watch time is very important
Watch time is very important
If you want to grow your channel, pay attention to your watch time. YouTube values watch time over everything else.
How can you have a long watch time? MAKE AWESOME CONTENT.
What About You?
Are you actively growing a YouTube channel? If so, what tips did we miss in this interview? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Infographic
INFOGRAPHIC – How to Build a Successful YouTube Channel – with Patrick South
Resources Mentioned
Equipment used by Patrick to create YouTube videos:
Though marketers might have you believe that content creation is the only way to get noticed online, the truth is advertising is far from dead ? it’s just hiding.
Rather than using obtrusive banner ads and flashing sidebars, smart businesses have begun investing in so-called native ads, which blend seamlessly into any website’s style to prevent disruptions to user experience. Even better, like content, native ads give a major boost to your SEO efforts. Here’s how.
You Want Lots of Links for High Rankings
While Google’s algorithms for determining rankings change seemingly every month, one factor always remains: Links. So far, link building is hands-down the most important activity you can do to improve your site’s SEO ? more important than keyword selection, meta-tag creation, and content optimization combined. The fact is, the more links on other sites that point to yours, the easier search engines can find your site.
The reason for this dates back to the advent of Google, when founder Larry Page created PageRank, software that could determine the popularity of webpages using incoming links. Page used the same tech to develop Google, which quickly became the most powerful search engine on the Web. Eventually, Page used PageRank’s numbers to understand quality of webpages, which only further improved the effectiveness of Google’s searches.
However, before Google began organizing search results based upon quality, websites began abusing the power of link building (as well as other optimization techniques). Many added their webpages to directories in an attempt to trick Google’s spiders into ranking their sites higher ? and it worked. However, today, Google actually penalizes such blatant attempts at SEO with lower rankings, though, importantly, advertisements still contribute positively to a webpage’s rank.
Thus, having incoming links is crucial to your site’s placement on search engine results, but there is a limit to how and where you should build links. Thankfully, native advertising makes the process so much simpler.
Native Advertising Is Good for Everyone
There is a reason Google is trying to curb the popularity of artificial link-building: It hurts the search engine’s ability to provide relevant and valuable results to Web users. When the most optimized pages always outrank those most applicable to search keywords, users leave discouraged, and the Internet as a whole suffers.
In an ideal world, your website would naturally gain incoming links from Web users who know your company and appreciate your products and content. However, now that nearly every business has come online, it is nearly impossible for one to stand out without engaging in active SEO, which means actively attempting to accumulate incoming links. Unfortunately, getting publishers to add your links to their sites isn’t always easy. Because Google punishes publishers and businesses for obvious paid links, publishers are hesitant to add links to their sites without context.
Enter: native advertising. Though it comes in many styles ? from full content creation to native ad networks ? native advertising blends into a publisher’s existing content, providing value to everyone involved: Business owners achieve more incoming links as well as added visibility for their pages and products; publishers gain income and additional content to populate their sites; and users benefit from enhanced website style and advertisements tailored to their interests.
As a result, higher quality sites (meaning those deemed reliable and popular by Google) are generally more likely to accept only native advertising, which means your SEO will increase dramatically by opting to subscribe to a native ad network or engage in content creation.
Traditional Advertising Is Dying
Though native advertising’s benefits are incredibly useful to your site’s SEO, making the switch to native advertising should be your top priority for another reason entirely: the imminent death of traditional advertising. As more and more businesses customize their advertising content to specific groups of Web users ? and as consumers demand more interaction from their favorite brands ? the centuries-old style of one-way advertising (a la print ads and television commercials) is declining slowly, painfully, and obviously.
Native advertising is the future, for better or for best. By using native strategies to increase your incoming links, your site will rank higher on search engine results, but that isn’t even the most powerful benefit of the advertising style. By integrating your ads into content Web users want, your business becomes a contributor with a devoted online following. In the end, your increased SEO and improved reputation mean one thing: more sales.
One of the most successful websites in the field of online marketing had once used this technique, it doesn’t matter how much they have been through to achieve such success, what really matters is that they have managed to reach their goals.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is a form of digital marketing where companies serve ads to people who have already visited their websites. This definition confuses a lot of marketers but to simplify it, let’s think about it in a different way.
Imagine you are a marketing manager of an electronics store. Someone comes in, walks around the shop, stares at one computer, reads all the information related to it and leaves the store without buying it. While observing his journey in your store, you started wondering how to get this person back into your store, present him with all the features of this computer, remind him of its benefits to finally close the deal. You’re thinking that if you could go after him, and have another chance at presenting this computer, you would totally do. He might end up purchasing it, or not. But at least, you’ve tried!
Let’s mirror this in your online store now. But instead of going after this prospect in the streets, you go after him online when he’s visiting other sites. If the targeting is done correctly, you can show him the same computer he was looking at on your products page.
Your goal is to market your product and sell it. So Let’s think of this way, someone comes to ask about a product but leaves without buying, the best way to convince him to purchase the item would be to send someone behind him who can remind him if not convince him of the products and its benefits and that it is the best bargain he could afford in the market. But of course you won’t do that in real life, it would be creepy, awkward and most importantly, it will make the consumer anxious enough to get rid of you and it also illegal to stalk someone like that. But however weird that may sound, it can be done online, and it’s not at all illegal, the technique is known as Retargeting or Remarketing
The reasons why remarketing is preferable are basically the efficiency and low cost of impressions, the accurate targeting of people, improves the return on investment, the branding’s cost becomes effective and eventually deliver better conversion rates. This is one of the reason people are engaging into the online marketing world instead of the actual one. It is not as hard as it seems, it basically takes a little bit of time to be accommodated.
When you master the skills of retargeting it will become easier for you to build a fast growing company that will make the outcome more quantitative than what you have expected. With the help of various platforms on the internet, you can really step it up and manage to find the right targets. One of the most useful platforms are the ones that keep an eye on the visitors, know their interests, calculate their behaviors and all this can be done by simply leaving a cookie in their browser and as a result, displaying for them various ads that convey exactly what products they are interested in.
Perfect Audience
The Perfect Audience provides a small manual that informs the user on how to properly use the website in order to make the most out of it.
The people at Perfect Audience make sure that you never go weary of retargeting people, they do the job and thus provide a very simple service for people who have the need to keep their retargeting strategy on a certain level. A script is handed to the owner to be included in his or her website’s body and after that, a list should be created of the types of visitors that must be retargeted, a campaign should be outlined in order to target specific parts of the the targeting list you have already created and when all this is down, the ads will start appearing in every slot of a website the target visits.
Social media, and especially Facebook that has an immense database of users, will contribute in making the come back to your website, how is that you may ask? The answer is very simple. When the code that you had implemented in your website functions, the customers who closed the page and went to browse Facebook, will encounter an ad from your website and with a slight chance will persuade him to go back and check out. Perfect Audience can target people on Facebook through standard ads that appear at the side or an ad that can be displayed in the user’s news feed
Retargeter
This is a new website in the field of retargeting, it basically based itself on the other website that already existed and managed to combine all the good things they offer in addition to the new thing they offer, that is it quickly managed to become of the most used websites that offer this service. There are plenty of services Retargeter offers, starting from Facebook exchange to search retargeting, the website cookies ads just by simply a click, in other words, if a consumer click an ad it will directly go to his cookies which will make it, alongside with other ads, appears in every other website and free ad slot. The main targets this website aims to achieve is to integrate its ads into websites with over 30 thousands new visitors every week, the option with which you can create ads vary from geographic, income or the interests of the consumers.
Retargeter allows you to control the number of ads you want to be displayed every month, this way you will be able to control your financial position as well, the prices they offer per month can be a little bit expensive but they offer the best service in the market to the time of writing these lines.
AdRoll
The last platform is perhaps is the most used in the most known. Adroll was first made appearance in 2007 and since then it managed to introduce the advertising world with a new marketing technique and especially retargeting. The adopt both strategies that are based on content and behavior, in other words, they offer ads based on the interests of the consumer and his behavior and thanks to this their customer service in the best out there. As far as payments are concerned, there are many levels you than you can use, the starter package allows you to spend whatever you like, and the other two levels, premium and plus are each set with a specific amount of money on monthly basis.
But what distinguish them the most among their competitors? The answer is the team and the experience they have in the field of retargeting, not only this, their dashboard offerings are also a factor that makes people choose them. Their platform offers the users plenty of option that they can use in order to control their ads and websites
Conclusion
By the end of reading this article you will be familiar with the term of targeting, also known as remarketing, and have fully grasp the basis of it. You will also be informed of the platforms the deliver the best options and easy access to your content. Aside from the platforms we have mentioned there are a lot of other option, Chango, Triggit, Google and Fetchback are also ones of top platforms you can use if you don’t think one of the ones mentioned above doesn’t go along with your financial position of your desirable settings.
Video is quickly becoming a default tool for marketers around the world. However, producing videos is only one part of the equation. A compelling video has a higher chance of driving business results, but compelling videos are ignored every day, getting little to no traffic.
Marketers are presented with a tricky challenge: a lot of internet browsers just don’t see ads anymore. But videos grab attention and are often seen as easier to consume than a 15 page document. The most common types of video ads arepreviewsbefore another piece of video content, ads in search engines, or paid media on social.
For the last decade, the social option has lived almost exclusively in the land of YouTube, but since last year, Facebook has officially become a player in the video field. November 2015 marked the first month wheremore videos were uploaded to Facebook than posts containing links to YouTube. At the end of the day, neither truly has a definite advantage, but they do offer very different opportunities that I’ll delve into below.
The New Adwords is Video
One of the reasons why most companies today advertise through Adwords is that it’s a pretty cheap method and has good return. A staggering amount of the population uses Google for search, and showing up against strategic keywords can be an extremely efficient strategy for acquiring new customers. The downside is that as more and more companies wise up to the good deal that AdWords provides,certain keywords now cost hundreds of dollars to advertise on.
Video ads, however, are still pretty advantageous cost-wise. If you decide to go this route, you’ll be working through Google’s video advertising, called Trueview. Think of it as a direct video equivalent of AdWords, except you can use it to target certain channels or topics instead of targeting specific keywords. You can even do video remarketing, meaning you can target users based on their previous interactions with a specific video.
With TrueView, not only do you benefit from a very advantageous6 cent per click average, you leverage Google’s very large reach. You have three options to advertise:
in stream, showing your video right before the one users initially searched for (commonly known as a pre roll),
in search, or
in display (as a recommended video on the right-hand side of the video the user is watching)
One of the things that makes TrueView such a great opportunity is that you are only charged if the user actually watches the video past a certain time stamp. That way, you are can ensure that people actually saw your advertisement.
Also, since videos from YouTube are embedded all over the web, there is a chance that your ad will show up on aniche site that is highly relevant to your market. Have you ever visited a site, left, and then saw their ads all over the web? Well you can accomplish the same thing with your own videos on YouTube. And remember, if users watched videos embedded on sites they trust and see your ad, they’re likely to associate the two in their mind.
There is a New Kid in Town
Facebook has been on the rise in video for the past year. With over 17 million video shares for the ice bucket challenge, the social network has definitely shown that it can be a massive player in the world of video. In order to keep that momentum going, they’ve put in place a series of tools, like video scheduling, captioning, and analytics, that have led them to animpressive average 100 million hoursof video watchedevery day.Their ad strategy for video is a little different than YouTube’s. The videos are shown in the feed of users, and they autoplay as people scroll down.
Where Facebook’s video ads truly shine is in their targeting. As you can imagine, the social network has a lot of information about their users. This allows marketers to implement some very granular settings, and means you can also tailor those who see your video to a precise target market. Keep in mind that this is all abidding process, so narrowing your reach means your cost per click will go up. It all depends on what your goal is. If this is a campaign to increase brand awareness, you might want to keep the audience as general as possible, and get as many views as possible. Howevermost B2B campaigns will be more successful with a more targeted approach, and Facebook certainly supports that.
Don’t fall in the view trap
If you haven’t done that much paid advertising for video, you might have a hard time justifying it at first. With any new marketing spend, results are expected, and the common go-to metric to track results with video is views. However, video views are often an oversimplification of what the medium can really do.It’s important to set up goals that mean something toyourorganization. Whether your video’s goal is to drive more traffic, or to gather fresh leads, make sure everyone on your team understands what the target is.
For general awareness campaigns, both YouTube and Facebook can be fantastic options since they have an extremely large user base to target. If you’re looking for a very specific demographic, Facebook has the most precise and easy to manage targeting tools.
For conversion, both can work, but YouTube is slightly more straightforward. The end of an ad can end with acall-to-actionand a link to your website, which is about as much as you can ask for. Since Facebook video ads appear just like promoted posts, users can easily click on your company name and reach your page. If you’re confident in your social media presence, this might be a better option, but if you’re pretty silent on there, it means users have to look around your page to find your website URL, and you’ll likely to see a heavy bounce rate.
For both options, remember that the first impression is key. That means:
Pay attention to the thumbnail you use, it’s the first thing users will see. In the case of YouTube in search and in stream ads, this is what entices people to click.
Shorter is better. These videos are always showing up before something the viewer wants to see, so don’t be tedious with the length.
The first few seconds are everything. People can skip after 5 seconds on YouTube, and Facebook autoplays as viewers are scrolling. That means the first few seconds need to be the most engaging part of your video if you want users to keep watching.
Like the marketing assets you’ve been using up to now, videos and their promotion are about planning. Video ads are not scary at all. In fact, if you’re already doing display ads on Facebook and YouTube, you’ll find most of the terms familiar, and the platforms to be almost the same. Video ads on these two social networks bring a new mentality to the medium. More importantly, they give you a fantastic opportunity to bring in the leads that truly matter to you.
New solution brings Vidyard’s industry-leading video analytics, viewer engagement data and video personalization to Adobe Marketing Cloud
KITCHENER, Ontario–March 22, 2016–Vidyard, the leading video marketing and video analytics platform for business, today announced a new suite of integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud to help the companies’ shared customers expand their use of video content and audience engagement analytics to attract, engage, qualify and convert more customers.
Through the new integration, Vidyard users can now easily embed videos across their digital properties using drag-and-drop components within Adobe Experience Manager while tracking detailed video performance data and audience engagement insights within Adobe Analytics. Customers can also leverage Vidyard’s new Personalized Video solution for delivering personalized video experiences for each individual viewer by seamlessly weaving their name, company name, company logo or other unique content directly into the video itself.
“Our customers are using video content to engage and convert their audiences at every stage of the buying journey, and many of them now have thousands of videos across disparate digital properties,” said Devon Galloway, CTO at Vidyard. “Our new integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud will help those businesses scale the use of video across their digital programs and to leverage unique audience engagement insights to optimize their performance and make smarter decisions.”
Although it is important to provide a variety of content throughout the sales cycle, video is emerging as the most powerful medium to drive increased engagement and conversion rates. In a 2015 survey by research firm Demand Metric, more than 70 percent of marketers reported that video converts better than other content types, but less than 10 percent are using video analytics to help qualify leads and improve the results of demand generation programs.
“Vidyard has proven to be a powerful solution for managing our growing video library, tracking the engagement of each individual viewer, and creating unique personalized video experiences that help grab people’s attention,” said Michael Ballard, senior manager of digital marketing at Lenovo. “The new integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud will help us scale our video marketing programs in an efficient and controlled manner while accessing the insights and intelligence we need to make better decisions on the content we’re producing.”
The skyrocketing growth of online video has created big opportunities for marketers, but the most effective way to get value out of a video marketing program is to integrate video analytics and audience viewing data with other marketing tools where it can be viewed in context and made actionable. For example, simply knowing that a particular prospect watched a video to the end is somewhat interesting, but the information becomes more useful when put in the marketing cloud and viewed in the context of all the other interactions that individual has had with the vendor. That is a critical step to helping marketers prioritize leads and move them through the buying journey.
To learn more about Vidyard’s integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud, visit us at Kiosk #29 in the Innovation Showcase at Adobe Summit or check out this link: http://ift.tt/1XK2xKF
About Adobe Marketing Cloud
Adobe Marketing Cloud empowers companies to use big data to effectively reach and engage customers and prospects with highly personalized marketing content across devices and digital touch points. Eight tightly integrated Solutions offer marketers a complete set of marketing technologies that focus on analytics, web and app experience management, testing and targeting, advertising, audience management, video, social engagement and campaign orchestration. The tie-in with Adobe Creative Cloud makes it easy to quickly activate creative assets across all marketing channels. Thousands of brands worldwide including two thirds of Fortune 50 companies rely on Adobe Marketing Cloud.
About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.
For someone with an online presence, personal or business, the concept of an SEO strategy can seem a little daunting. Unless you have experience in digital marketing, you might have not even heard of search engine optimisation, which could mean you’re missing out of a huge amount of web traffic. Never fear; this is exactly why a team of dedicated digital marketing experts from have put their heads together, and compiled this helpful infographic on how to structure your strategies for 2016, so that you can get all the insider tips on the latest search engine algorithms and design your website to be offered among on the first page of search results.
Thousands of sites are rapidly losing visitors, due to being improperly optimized (if at all!), and incorrect or out-dated strategies can do just as much damage to your ranking as a page with zero strategy. Google is refining its searches, and becoming more understanding of the internet user’s intentions when they browse Google. So no, you can’t just pepper your website with keywords and expect that to work anymore! Now, if your content isn’t interesting and fresh, or your backlinks seem a bit shady, Google will be looking the other way. So it’s up to you to scroll through the infographic below, and implement these tips into your SEO strategy.
There have been thousands of articles published on SEO over the past 12 months. Many I’ve read, some I’ve written and a few I’ve bookmarked for safekeeping. Here is a list of my 10 favourites from 2015:
All the way back in January 2015, Kristine Schachinger wrote an article on Search Engine Watch to put an end to six myths that some junior or less-informed SEOs may have believed were true.
In her article, Kristine gave an idea of the cost of SEO, the importance of our Google ranking and put to bed any claims that SEO is dead, among other topics.
Back in February, Darren Shaw wrote a detailed article for Wordtracker on improving your local SEO to help potential customers find you or your client’s business in the local neighbourhood.
Darren goes on to explain the importance of listing all of your current contact information, phone numbers and locations to help Google better understand where the business is located. As well as this, the blog post has lots of information on local citations.
Daniel Bianchini published this insightful piece on State of Digital back in May, going into some less-discussed aspects of SEO.
In his post, Daniel goes into good detail about Redirect Chains, Layered Navigation, Robots.txt and Schema Mark-Up and their importance to your website.
Danny Sullivan’s periodic table of SEO from June makes it into my list for being an awesome piece of linkbait as much as anything else. It’s a pretty clever adaptation of the original periodic table, don’t you think?
The article on Search Engine Land explains that it was published to help “focus on the fundamentals needed to achieve success with search engine optimisation” and that “the table is designed to broadly guide those new to or experienced with SEO into general areas of importance.”
Marcus Tober published the exciting Searchmetrics Ranking Factors study back in July this year. With the mass data they have to analyse I recommend you download the Whitepaper from their website to give you a greater understanding of what the important ranking factors in Google.
The top five are:
1. Relevant, holistic content is more important than ever
2. User experience – beyond the desktop
3. Keywords are becoming increasingly obsolete
4. Backlinks – correlations are decreasing
5. Social signals – a bonus for organic rankings
Data is from the US and as they often get Google updates before the United Kingdom and Europe, it’s an opportunity to get ahead of the game.
Time for a bit of self-promotion. Back in August I published an article explaining lots of things you may be doing to your website that are potentially killing your Google rankings that you may not be aware of.
This has been the most shared article on Receptional.com in 2015, so I like to think my name was worthy of being included in this list.
SEMRush have a wealth of great content on their blog and my favourite SEO-related post from 2015 came from Fili Wiese in September.
Fili went into great detail about page download speed, indexed pages and structured data among other information to help Google better understand your website.
In November, Shane Barker published a guide on Search Engine People to help fix and prevent any duplicate issues SEOs may have when it comes to international SEO.
Aside from an issue with the language barrier which could cause duplicate content issues in Google, Shane produced an in-depth guide to help with managing multilingual versions of your website and targeting specific countries and more.
Brian Dean updated his SEO campaign case study recently so I couldn’t resist included it in this piece.
All of Backlinko’s blog posts are flagship content and must read pieces but this one falls into the SEO category. Brian’s case study goes into detail about how he helped increase one client’s traffic by 15% in only two weeks, explained in a way you can recreate for yourself or your clients.
♨ ‘mobile-friendly’ sites will rank even higher;
♨ RankBrain is not for crawling or ranking;
♨ how to opt out of Google featured snippets;
♨ YouTube vs Facebook video;
♨ Twitter's 140-character limit ‘is staying’;
♨ Twitter's algorithmic timeline;
♨ Instagram's algorithmic timeline;
♨ Instagram engagement down 40%;
♨ what you need to know about Windows 10 Mobile;
♨ Skype for Web gets a slew of new features;
♨ ...and much more.
If you read the Vidyard blog you’ve probably heard of interactive content. You probably have also been told that if you’re not already doing it, you’re too late, that all the good ideas have already been taken. While that last part is totally not true, it’s something that is said because this type of media has a high chance of feeling gimmicky. And the truth is, it often feels like a lot of companies out there are doing it just because someone told them to and to do it fast before your competitor does.
To understand where interactive content came from, you have to understand where content marketing came from. A few years ago, there came a point where internet ads were so ubiquitous that they all became white noise to users, even if they were actually interested in the product being advertised. This is when marketers shifted strategies and decided to become experts in the subjects pertinent to their clients, andprovide them content that would make them trusted. This approach was a lot more palatable than traditional ads, and it worked really well for a while.
However, we are currently approaching content critical mass dangerously fast. The same way that ads became white noise, content is starting to be ignored because there is so much of it. Companies need to find new ways to separate themselves from the pack. The big problem with traditional content like blog posts and white papers is that the user can still just ignore them. The idea with interactive content is to produce something so compelling that it’s impossible not to engage with it.
Humans are not meant to simply sit and absorb. We all have an impulse to be active when we learn. The birth of this type of content is linked almost exclusively to the rise of content marketing. At this point, we all know the benefits of content marketing. It gives more leads, provides them more consistently, and it makes the sales cycle much easier.
As good as content marketing is, it does have its flaws. A lot of people don’t want to read walls of text (except the one you’re currently reading, because it’s super interesting), no matter how well laid out and pretty they are. Many products still struggle to be well-understood through traditional methods. And even if it brings in more qualified leads, it’s still hard for a salesperson to understand exactly what the buyer has read, and what he understood.
Interactive content serves two purposes in fixing those flaws. It makes content more interesting to consume, and it’s a way to gather early customer data in a non-scummy way. That information can then be used in the sales cycle to better understand the needs of potential clients. In short, everybody wins.
The Low Down
At times it seems like every type of content can be spun into an interactive version. We’re still honestly waiting on an interactive quarterly earnings report (please no). Our friends at SnapApp have identifieda staggering ten types, including interactive video, calculators and quizzes. Looking at the list can be a little dizzying but really, they break down into two categories, visual and personalized.
The visual category encompasses things like infographics and images galleries. The move towards illustrated assets is a no brainer whenmost people describe themselves as visual learners. Interactive infographics make information more compelling, but also allow you to see what the customer clicked on, how far he went into the story, and potentially where he dropped off. Great examples likethis oneinclude dynamic animations that keep you scrolling, you want to know what happens next, just like a movie. The whole logic is one step ahead of images, this isn’t just about being noticed, it’s about maintaining the attention of your reader.
The personalized category is where things get really interesting. These are designed to make customers truly live the benefits of a solution. It’s a huge challenge to all SaaS companies. Even if their products are truly revolutionary, they sound extremely abstract at first. Things like ROI calculators can clarify the value of a product, and makes things really personal since customers are usingtheirnumbers.
This category is also great to stimulate engagement from your customers. Sending a video to a prospect is one step, and sending one where he is personally called out in the video might seem trivial,but it leads to 47% higher click-through rate.
Letting your content do your hard work.
The danger with interactive content is the same as with any new media: doing it just because it’s cool. Many marketers fall into this trap. You might make an interactive white paper, but then just use it the same way you did the old ones. However, this type of content has one big difference, it gives you a slew of new inputs from your clients that you previously didn’t have.
With a traditional piece of content, it’s for the client to consume, and hopefully he or she gives you a call or shoots you an email after careful consideration. Whether that prospect does or not, you’ll never know what part of your document made them reach for the phone, or what the drop-off point was.
The main draw to interactive content is not the novelty, it’s the information it gives you. Sure, the initial buzz was about the fact that it allowed you to make boring stuff somewhat fun. But the true lasting benefit will be the analytics to help you improve your content and the robust prospect profiles it helps you build so well.
If you notice that no one reads past page 10, or everyone stops watching your videos after a minute, it’s time to make things shorter. Or maybe it’s time to add a quiz at page 10 of your white paper to keep people engaged, and maybe you can keep your videos long, but you need to add calls to action after the first minute.
Sure your content should be good, it should be interesting,it has to beusefulto the reader. But your end goal is always that extra lead, and learning more about the leads you already have. The old way was very much about putting up a bunch of content up on your site and hoping for the best. This might be a little more involved, but the rewards are exponential.
Something old, something new.
Since the dust has sort of settled now, and we all have fancy clickable white papers and interactive videos, it might be time to look back. It’s easy to dismiss the content you made two or three years ago. You probably don’t realize it, but a lot of the things you write are fairly timeless. What often happens is that the wrapper ages badly.
So take that old white paper, and divide it into three pieces. Take the challenge now with your biggest and most successful piece of content. Chances are you can turn a section into a quiz, you can poll users on what they thought about it, and create a calculator about it to drive your point home.
Not only is that awesome because you now have refreshed content and fresh ways to learn about your database, but it’s also very little work. Let’s face it, the challenge to creating content really is about research and coming up with ideas. So why don’t we repurpose our old ideas when we had really good ones? You’ll most likely discover that you have a new outlook on the matter, andmaking things interactive will make the content feel fresh to your customers.
It’s time to look back.
So it looks like interactive content has only been around for a couple years, and we’ve already all gotten worked up over it. If anything, it’s time for all of us to pause and take a breather. It’s not too late to start getting into that game, if anything, now is the time. Just remember that making the content is just one step. Doing it just for the hell of it because it looks cool will achieve nothing.
If you’ve been doing interactive content for a while, look at ways to repurpose old content and make them fresh again. If you have a solid library in place, figure out new ways you can use interactivity to pull data and feed it to your marketing automation platform for more tailored nurture streams or even to your CRM platform to better arm your sales team. Maybe it’s time to try new mediums to make old content feel fresh.
Interactive content is in a great place right now. It’s past the state of a fad, and people can start really thinking about how it fits into their strategies. More than simply fitting in, it’s starting to make things markedly better. As DJ Quik once said, if it don’t make dollar, it don’t make sense. And interactive content certainly does: Marketers have found it60% better than traditional methods at generating leads, and 40% better at nurturing existing leads. If this isn’t on your radar, it doesn’t mean you’re doing everything wrong, and it certainly isn’t too late to start. Think of this as an exciting new time, a time where your creativity has the power to influence people and their decisions.
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